Step 7: Posing

For the pose I used the ZBrush Transpose tool, it's faster and easier than making a rig inside 3ds Max.

Posing the character

Step 8: Hair

I decided to make the hair inside ZBrush using Fibermesh. As I'd never used it before, I thought it would be a nice opportunity to test it, and think came out quite nicely. I made five different setups, one for the eyebrows, mustache, and hair, and two for the beard.

The setups for the model's face

Step 9: Render

This is the point when you see if everything wells well, and your character really comes to life.
I used V-Ray for the render - it's the only render engine I've ever used so I'm quite comfortable with it. I made a basic 3-point light rig for the final shot.

The 3-point lighting setup

Step 10: Shaders

The shaders are quite simple too, as you can see. For the hair I used VRayHairMtl and to my surprise it looked good.

The VRayHairMtl shader looked great on the model

Step 11: Render set up

The render setup was quite basic, and I did just a little color correction in Photoshop for the final image.

Final render of the model

Oh, something I forgot to say in the beginning - always gather references, lots of references. For modeling, texturing, and lighting, it's always useful in every step of the process.

Step 12: Conclusion

This character was the first in my modeling reel and I'm pretty happy with the final piece. Every time I make a new character I learn something new, and I learned a lot of new things with this project. I hope you guys like it and check out the final result on my modeling reel: https://vimeo.com/77063393.

Moustafa Shaheen on Sun, 03 August 2014 1:43am hey , thank you for making this tutorial , it was so useful for me and i watched your reel , it was awesome !

Vesta on Sun, 27 April 2014 6:22am Amazing work! I like it!
I have some questions only.
Step 3 and step 4 look the same ( in the text), I think the in the step 4 something should be about adding details on the model. And It`s interesting for me, how looks Glossiness map for this character. I think, it is not the same as Specular map. Am i right?